Hendrik Buschmeier

Research Interests

My general area of interest is computational modelling of the representations, processes, and behaviours underlying the human capability for interacting in dialogue. In particular, I am interested in the issue of how a joint understanding can be achieved among autonomous conversational agents (human or artificial), including questions such as: How can an agent know whether and how its utterances are understood by its interaction partner? How can it know what the reasons for problems in understanding are? How can an agent design and adapt its utterances and behaviours so that mis-understandings are repaired and future ones avoided? How do agents coordinate their behaviour, cooperate to achieve joint goals, and collaborate on the construction of a joint understanding? Finally, I am interested in how a joint understanding can be achieved in an effective yet efficient way, such that a model is plausible from a cognitive point of view, and practical from a computational point of view.

Selected Publications

See the complete list of publications organised by topic, by date, or on Google scholar.

Buschmeier, H., & Kopp, S. (2014). A dynamic minimal model of the listener for feedback-based dialogue coordination. In SemDial 2014: Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, pp. 17–25, Edinburgh, UK. [pdf, bib, model]

Buschmeier, H. & Kopp, S. (2013). Co-constructing grounded symbols—Feedback and incremental adaptation in human–agent dialogue. Künstliche Intelligenz, 27:137–143. [pdf/preprint, bib]

Buschmeier, H. & Kopp, S. (2012). Using a Bayesian model of the listener to unveil the dialogue information state. In SemDial 2012: Proceedings of the 16th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, pp. 12–20, Paris, France. [pdf, bib, model]

Buschmeier, H., Baumann, T., Dosch, B., Kopp, S., & Schlangen, D. (2012). Combining incremental language generation and incremental speech synthesis for adaptive information presentation. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pp. 295–303, Seoul, South Korea. [pdf, bib, video]

Buschmeier, H., & Kopp, S. (2011). Towards conversational agents that attend to and adapt to communicative user feedback. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, pp. 169–182, Reykjavík, Iceland. [pdf/preprint, bib]

Buschmeier, H., Malisz, Z., Włodarczak, M., Kopp, S., & Wagner, P. (2011). ‘Are you sure you’re paying attention?’ – ‘Uh-huh’. Communicating understanding as a marker of attentiveness. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2011, pp. 2057–2060, Florence, Italy. [pdf/preprint, bib]

Buschmeier, H., Bergmann, K., & Kopp, S. (2009). An alignment-capable microplanner for natural language generation. In Proceedings of the 12th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, pp. 82–89, Athens, Greece. [pdf, bib]

Software

• TextGridTools – Read, write, and manipulate Praat TextGrid files with Python (with Marcin Włodarczak)
• IPAACA – Incremental Processing Architecture for Artificial Conversational Agents (with Ramin Yaghoubzadeh)
• PRIMO – Probabilistic Inference Modules (with Jan Pöppel)

Teaching

Contact

Email: hbuschme@uni-bielefeld.de Twitter: @hbuschme
Phone: +49-521/106-12171   Skype: hbuschme
Mail: PO-Box 10 01 31, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany
Face-to-face: CITEC building, room 2.039
Office hour: by appointment
My public PGP key (see also on keybase.io):
6299 7D58 9F34 DBE8 3BA2   918E F282 86FE 624C BCD5